In the deployment of a prosthesis such as a stent or stent graft into the human or animal body via intraluminal techniques, an introducer or delivery device is used to introduce the prosthesis into a vessel or a lumen of the body. After the prosthesis has been deployed and expanded within the lumen, the introducer is withdrawn from the body.
Stents may be inserted into an anatomical vessel or duct for various purposes. Stents may maintain or restore patency in a formerly blocked or constricted passageway, for example, following a balloon angioplasty procedure. Other stents may be used for different procedures. For example, stents placed in or about a graft have been used to hold the graft in an open configuration to treat an aneurysm. Additionally, stents coupled to one or both ends of a graft may extend proximally or distally away from the graft to engage a healthy portion of a vessel wall away from a diseased portion of an aneurysm to provide endovascular graft fixation.
Stents may be either self-expanding or balloon-expandable, or they may have characteristics of both types of stents. Self-expanding stents may be delivered to a target site in a compressed configuration and subsequently expanded by removing a delivery sheath, removing trigger wires, and/or releasing diameter reducing ties. With self-expanding stents, the stents expand primarily based on their own expansive force without the need for further mechanical expansion. In a stent made of a shape memory alloy such as nitinol, the shape memory alloy may be employed to cause the stent to return to a predetermined configuration upon removal of the sheath or other device maintaining the stent in its pre-deployment configuration.
Depending on the configuration of the stent and the introducer, the process to load the stent onto the introducer may be difficult and/or complex. For example, the stent may include a plurality of apices at a stent end that the introducer is configured to capture. However, manipulating the apices by hand in order to have the apices captured by the introducer may be difficult. Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method of loading stents onto introducers.